Friday, January 9, 2015

Get Used to Feeling Like Crap

Our Krav Maga
instructor, a former counter-terrorism special forces operator in the IDF, in a
speech about how to succeed in the army, imbibed us with, what I feel, is the
most important piece of advice I have ever received, “Get used to feeling like
shit. Learn to embrace suffering.”

As I have
learned from every one of our instructors, and really every soldier I’ve met
thus far, the army is all about learning to become capable in uncomfortable
situations. Always being tired. Always being injured. Being dirty, nervous,
scared, on edge all the time. The sooner we, as individuals, learn to embrace
this state of being, to familiarize ourselves with pain enough to recognize
suffering for what it is, temporary, the better soldiers we will become and the
easier and more enjoyable our experience will become. The best soldiers are not
necessarily the strongest, fastest, or most in shape guys, but rather they are
the guys able to suffer and to constantly feel like shit, without quitting,
mentally succumbing, or letting it affect their disposition or how they go
about their duties.

This is what our
pre-army program is all about. We crawl and run in the middle of the night; we
do full contact Krav Maga, we rotate guard duty all night, we close our eyes
and absorb body blows every workout, and we are never told a schedule so we
never know what’s coming. We are constantly on edge, wondering when our mefaked
will wake us up and tell us to get into “matav shteim” (pushup position).

This is the most
valuable lesson I will take with me from this pre-army program. It’s not the
workouts themselves; I have always been a runner, an athlete, and I would have
been fine physically in the army, as I have been during our workouts. Rather,
it’s learning to cope with being tired, sore, and on edge, to deal with new
situations, and to still be mentally present and alert. It’s all about having
the right mindset and becoming mentally tough enough to know that you can keep
pushing past your breaking point. A lot of our workouts have made me realize
that exhaustion and doing well in an army environment are more a function of
mental fortitude than actual physical ability.

Crawling is the
best example of this. Crawling is purely a function of mental toughness: are
you able to let go of that fear, that voice in your head telling you to take it
easy, and just say fuck it, and then crawl with reckless abandon? To go as hard
as you can? One day we were crawling on really tough terrain (rocks, dirt, and
concrete) and I was struggling because each step was too painful. I watched
another kid crawl and he was killing it, he was just going so much faster and
harder than I was. It was like he was crawling on a mattress. Something in my
mind snapped at that moment. I realized that this pain, however uncomfortable,
would be fleeting. If I could, like my friend, be mentally tough enough to put
my mind elsewhere and just put one foot in front of the other, I would crush
it. This awakening allowed me to crawl with a newfound intensity at a higher
gear, as I broke free of that voice in my head telling me to stop, slow down
and take a break. I have never finished lower than second (out of 25) in any
crawling training since. In fact, while at an army base practicing the IDF obstacle
course(we need to complete it in
a certain time to graduate basic training), I completed the course with the
fastest time in the 6 year history of this pre-army training program, and a
time eligible for special forces.

This is why
crawling is such a large component of all the “gibushim” (tryouts) for the IDF
special forces: they want to see if we can block out the noise and push
ourselves as far as we can possibly go; to block out the pain and exhaustion,
and do what we need to. How bad do we want to be here?

During a workout
when we were in “matav shteim” (pushup position) and our arms started to shake,
our commander told us that our bodies shaking just means our mind is trying to
trick our bodies into thinking that we can’t go any further, that we have
reached our limit because it doesn’t want to have to suffer. As he said “that’s
bullshit. You can do this all day once you realize that the pain is all in your
mind. There’s nothing about this that will injure you.” Sometimes, our mefaked
makes us do pushups on our fists on the cement. At first, this was unbearably
painful; I couldn’t do it. My mind told my body it was too painful. After doing
it a little longer each time though, I realized that I could endure the pain
more and more each time, until it started to feel natural. After our toughest
workout to date, we had a competition (with our eyes shut) to see who could
stay in fist pushup position on rocks longest without succumbing to the pain. I
held out the longest, but as my eyes were shut, I was unaware that I had won…I
ended up enduring the pain, body shaking convulsively, for 10 minutes after
everyone else had quit.

I still hate doing
this, but I know that I can.

And that is a
huge difference.

Pushing past
those artificial barriers becomes euphoric. You realize that you are capable of
enduring so much more than you thought and you realize that each time you do
so, mental barriers start falling down one by one.

What a wonderful
lesson, not just for my IDF service, but to have with me the rest of my life.

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About Me

Around the time of graduating from Lehigh University this past May, I realized that I needed to follow through on my dream to become a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. I arrived in Israel on September 20th, and I will begin my service on December 10th. This will serve as an account of my experiences.